Two more links

One

Two

Logging the Web, part two

For some reason, I can’t stop looking at the third picture.

Logging the Web

Here are some things I found among my bookmarks. Except one, that I read about in an old magazine I found in a drawer, and then googled for.

http://www.blakearchive.org/
http://www.geocities.com/branwaedd/merlini.html
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/giorgio.vasari/lives.htm
http://www.vatican.va/library_archives/vat_library/
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html
http://www.pitt.edu/~medart/
http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/libraries/rare/

You might like them.

Pythagoras Sees the Ancestral Bird

A Remarkable Establishment

A clean, upstanding entertainment

The Vulkan Bros. Industrial Heritage Plesurewerks is open for the general public. Make it your next outing! Guaranteed proof against Regret, Scorn and Ants.*

*No actual guarantees made or implied.

God-in-the-Bottle

A fable

What you do is you set traps for them. They favor jam, small porcelain masks and tiny, functioning fishing rods; these are placed on the bottoms of glass jars. Then, in the twilight hours, they come: through the chimney, a window or perhaps, in these days, some drain pipe. If you get up at dawn, sometimes a god will have tarried too long and remain in one of the jars; swiftly plug it with a large cork rubbed with rosemary. Eventually, the god will become stiff and grey, like a stone figurine.

These things were taught to me by the tribesmen of the Village of Miraculous Carvings. They had been capturing and selling the bottled gods for seventeen centuries; first in vessels of carved limestone, then clay and, later, glass. All the village was very rich, I saw; they explained that at night the bottle-gods whispered of the secrets of Heaven and Earth; so they were deeply valuable. (This knowledge hitherto unguessed-at they sold to me in exchange for seven wood-gold coins from Ys and a copy of the Book of the Dream World; it is, perhaps, the fairest of trades to deal mystery for mystery.)

It is told of Haroun al-Raschid, the Scintillating Caliph, who would have been wise regardless, that he had eleven clay god-urns about his bed, who taught him all the languages of the world, and the ways and paths of the dream-world; he believed them to be djinn. In the end, gripped by curiosity because he could not see the shapes or faces of the djinn inside the urns, he uncorked one, and peered inside.
They say that is how Haroun al-Raschid, the Scintillating Caliph, died.

A Literary Conundrum

(all right, it’s really just a regular old problem, but I like the word “conundrum” too much not to use it)

William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books has 480 pages, and claims to contain “every page of Blake's 20 or so illuminated books”, while Illuminated Blake: William Blake's Complete Illuminated Works with a Plate-By-Plate Commentary, The only has 416 pages, and also, as you have probably already guessed, contains “Plate-by-Plate Commentary”, which I don’t particularly care for.

But The Illuminated Blake has horizontal pages.

I don’t know what to do.

Eight Views of my Teacup

1
From the east, at sunrise

2
From the south, when the sun is at its highest point

3
From the west, after the heat-death of the universe

4
From the south-east, with a hint of lemon

5
From the south-west, with milk and no sugar

6
From the north-west, after a meal

7
From the north-east, in the company of a friend

8
From the north, after a storm

Beat Merchandise

My Early Childhood

From an early age, I was interested in science. I split my first atom at the age of two, with a kitchen knife, and quickly proceeded to build my first nuclear power plant in the garden (with some help from my grandfather, who didn't share my interest, but quite enjoyed the explosion). This experiment didn't work out as I had planned, and after only a couple of weeks I abandoned nuclear fission altogether.

The following week, I tried to build a fusion reactor in the basement, but my mother discovered it and made me dismantle it and promise not to play with anything requiring atoms to be in their plasma state until I was at least five. I was severely disappointed, and spent the rest of the day learning classical Greek and building a scale model of a Turing machine, with moving parts.

I got up early the following day and rebuilt my fusion reactor inside the kitchen oven. By the time my mother got up, I had already proceeded to cold fusion.

It caused some embarrasment when I declined to accept the Nobel Price in Physics, but I preferred to celebrate my third birthday at home.

Random Afterthought

Since it turns out that not everyone already knows about Eyeblog's Creative Name Generator, I suppose I'd better mention it.

Also, while we're being random, Seventh Sanctum is fun.

A Small Note

I don’t usually buy the same book twice, not even by accident. But I did buy a copy of Coraline, without the illustrations, before I knew there were illustrations, so I had to buy it again. Now I don't know which one to keep, because the un-illustrated book is printed on much nicer paper. But that’s not the point, here. The point is that on the cover of the book, there’s a line that says “The Magical New York Times Best-seller”.

And that’s the point, here. I want to read the Magical New York Times.

Emo

So, what's up with this "emo"-thing?

I mean, the genre is 20 years old, but i've only just heard of it the last few months or so. And it's not like I'm subculturally inept, either. I mean, I can tell a goth apart from a metal-fan. That gotta count for something.

Okay, maybe it's just me who's out of touch. Or maybe not. Think about it: the genre is old enough for it's earliest practicers to be the same age as my parents, and yet the only people who listens to it are 14-16-year-olds. There's something genuinely weird going on here.

I'm going to investigate further into this, and get back with my results.

Ti ei ouranós empésoi?

The fear that the sky will fall has gone somewhat out of fashion, lately. I feel this is a great loss to us all.

Curiouser and Curiouser

We're definitely on to something with the robot destruction. I seem to have missed the panda bandwagon, though. Oh well, there's always the walrus train...

(I haven't actually read Radioactive Panda, mind you, I only followed the link from Girl Genius, pressed the back button once and found myself hit over the head with coincidence)

On Crank

The having of which is called crankiness

Here's the thing. When I was eight, the Soviet Union fell. At that time, I bought three barrels of evil jokes for fourteen rubles.

Not using your resources is to waste.

Sunflower Sutra

Sideways

Books books books

It's been...god, what, three years? Five? since I saw the book, that once. Then I forgot the title, and then I hunted for it, frantically, for two months, followed by resignation and an occasional poke about.
We've run out of ISBN numbers, you know. Ten digits and not they're too few; we're moving up to thirteen. That's a lot of book to sift through, right there. So I thought I'd never find it again.
Then three weeks ago I tripped over the title by chance. The Art of Looking Sideways.
It's damn near enough to make a man believe in miracles, if he didn't already. I ordered it immediately, I got it today.
This book...this book is glorious and sprawling. I fancy myself, in my vanity, to have seen quite a few books; this one is like none of them.
It claims to be 533 pages, but in fact it's twice that: it counts by spread, not page.
It has a chapter named »Insignia«.
It's like the internet in book form.*

I'd recommend it to everyone who likes things.


*Minus the porn and fourteen-year-old scriptkiddies. Cha-ching! Jackpot!